drive your plow over the bones of the dead sparknotes

The story takes place in the eighteenth century, a time when the rational beliefs of the Enlightenment existed alongside mysticism and religion. The Poland of The Books of Jacob is a rather different country to the one we know now, a sprawling commonwealth extending further into Eastern Europe, surrounded by three aggressive empires that were eventually to swallow it up. As you can imagine, it’s an ambitious undertaking, introducing the reader to a very unfamiliar world. Tokarczuk’s novel, then, attempts to introduce the man, the religion and the environment he lived in. He promoted baptism into Christianity as a means to an end, but while he was seen by his followers as a Messiah, others regarded him as a heretic, a man to be stopped, and made great efforts to do so. Born in Poland in 1726, this man of humble origins broke away from mainstream Judaism to start a different branch of the religion, eventually presenting himself as a saviour of sorts. The Books of Jacob (translated by Jennifer Croft, review copy courtesy of Text Publishing), running to close to a thousand pages, is a novel telling the real-life story of religious leader Jacob Frank. When you’ve been eagerly anticipating something, though, there’s always the chance of disappointment, so the question I want to focus on today is a simple one – is the book all it’s made out to be? Let’s find out… As an International Booker Prize winner and Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, Tokarczuk has become a major name in world literature, and today’s choice can only be described as a big book, in more ways than one. It happened with Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series, also with Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, and now you can add Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk’s latest novel in English to that list.

Very occasionally, a new work of translated fiction crosses over and becomes one of the most eagerly anticipated books around.

Drive your plow over the bones of the dead sparknotes